DRAKE, Colo.—With dried branches crackling and crumbling under her feet, Lorna Miller trudged over the remains of the fallen forest she once spent weekends hiking through. Almost all of the trees on her 6- and 8-acre properties are dead, leaving only skeletons of her memories scattered on the ground.
“I used to pick wild berries over here,” Lorna said, pointing her finger toward the barren landscape.
“This was once completely wooded as far as the eye can see.”
On a nearby hilltop, the 84-year-old finds a small concrete block in the dirt. She gives it a few sturdy kicks, and says it used to be her family’s fireplace.
A few feet away, she stands in a dry, rocky patch. This was where the balcony of her family’s weekend getaway once stood.
It was a place she and her husband spent endless afternoons enjoying the view.
But today, that view, the balcony, the house and the forest are gone—destroyed 10 years ago by the Bobcat Gulch wildfire.
“It was beautiful up here, it really was,” Lorna said, appraising the land.
“Not anymore.”
Lorna’s land was just a few acres of the 10,600 burned during the blaze.
Her home was one of 22 buildings destroyed.
And a decade later, she’s just one of the landowners still trying to cope with the loss of everything the fire took away.
“I don’t think it bothers me too much anymore—maybe because I got old,” Lorna said. “It was such a disaster. … It’s hard to come up here anymore.”
And her story echoes that of others devastated by the same blaze.
“Over time it fades,” said Rose Gowen, who lost her family’s getaway cabin and land to the fire, too.
“We don’t dwell on it. But miss it? Yes.”
The blaze that claimed so much started with just a few hot embers, which were left in an abandoned campfire on June 12, 2000.
The forest just west of Loveland was especially dry that day, and the little sparks quickly grew into a major wildfire.
Rose and Don Gowen, who owned a weekend home in those hills, were at their house in Loveland when they first saw the smoke to the west.
But the couple weren’t worried. They had always followed advice and cleared any trees directly surrounding their cabin. Because of this, they thought the building would be safe in a fire.
Lorna and her husband, Wayne Miller, weren’t too concerned either, she said.
It wasn’t until days later, when the residents were finally allowed back into the area, that they realized the severity of the fire.
“It was quite a shock,” said Rose of her first look at the area and their home.
“We weren’t expecting any loss, let alone total loss. There wasn’t anything left.”
The Gowens’ home, which they had built by hand from the ground up, was obliterated.
“Not even a stick of wood” was left, Don said.
Lorna was just as surprised to see what the blaze had done to her family’s getaway.
“It was horrible,” she said, adding she couldn’t do much more than stand still in shock at the sight of it.
For both families, all that was left of their cabins was charred and warped metal.
The Millers were helped by volunteers, who fit all the debris that was once their home into two loads of a pickup truck.
The Gowens were offered assistance, too—but instead decided to clear the remains themselves.
“I guess that was the first part of the healing process,” Rose said.
In the months and years following the fire, each family dealt with their destroyed land and home in different ways.
The Millers decided to keep their burnt property.
“I wanted to hang on to it,” Lorna said. “My grandson enjoyed it so very much.”
However, she’s hardly visited it since.
“There was nothing to come for,” she said.
With 90-year-old Wayne’s health declining, Lorna’s husband has never been back. Yet she still drives up the mountain about once a year to see how it’s doing.
Each time, she’s disappointed.
“This used to be so pretty. Now it’s barren,” Lorna said. “It’ll recover, but not in my lifetime.”
The Gowens have never been back to the place where they used to spend holidays and free time.
Just a few months after the blaze, they sold the property to a nearby landowner.
“We didn’t have the heart to do anything more with it,” Rose said.
“You’re just kind of numb. You put it behind you and move forward because you have no choice.”
With a decade passed since the fire, those affected still are grieving and rebuilding in their own ways.
For the Millers, their land has begun sprouting with life once again.
Recently, their adult grandson has started clearing the dead trees from the ground. He’s even hauled a trailer up to the site, where he spends weekends enjoying the open space.
On a recent trip to the land, Lorna was excited to find more than 100 tiny pine trees growing around the area. Some of them she’d planted herself—yet many had sprouted on their own, she said.
Some thin but healthy green Aspen trees growing nearby provided even more hope for the future.
Excited by all the growth, Miller snapped some photos to show her husband back in Loveland.
“It’s just amazing,” she said.
The Gowens, who sold their land, still haven’t been back to the spot their cabin once stood.
In fact, at times they’ve tried to simply forget about it all together.
“I play ostrich,” Rose said. “The less I think about it, the easier it is to cope with it.”
Still, they’ve begun inviting thoughts of the area—both the happy and sad—back into their lives.
In their garage hangs a memorial board for the cabin, which displays metal reminisces they were able to salvage from the ashes.
The blackened hammer, bell, cuckoo clock weight, pans and a nutcracker shaped like a squirrel may not look like much, Rose said—but they are proof of the cabin and the life they once had in the mountains.
And aside from the physical remains, thoughts of the area are sometimes unexpectedly triggered on their own, Rose added.
“At different times, when we go to the mountains and smell the pines or hear the wind in the trees, that’s when those memories come back,” she said.
“We had a lot of good memories, and we can hold on to that.”
